An Apple a Day (15 page)

It wasn't such a big deal I suppose, but imagine you're jet-lagged, starving hungry, and craving something nutritious; you order steamed vegetables and rice and you check repeatedly that they understand what this means—“Steamed not fried, please”—and then they bring you carrots and rice drenched in butter with a side order of fried sweet potato.

How could I eat food that was swimming in butter? I couldn't, is the simple answer. I didn't ask for anything special; I wanted them simply not to mess with my food. Is this an example of anorexic thinking; is this overly controlling, unreasonable?

For me, it always comes back to this issue of control. I turned to anorexia late on—until the age of nineteen, food and I were fine. Not eating was a way of punishing myself for being inadequate, for getting dumped; unfortunately anorexia offers surprisingly swift rewards. You starve, you get thin; you have control. Yes,
finally you have control over something! Of course, when you're seriously thin you're not in control at all. By the final year of university I'd lost nearly half my body weight. At that level there's nothing rational left: the brain is a muscle, and it wastes away just like the rest of your muscles. I would walk around Oxford at 3
AM
, 4
AM
alone, freezing, smoking.

But anorexia has been my way of controlling the uncontrollable world out there, a way of keeping other people out. It's me saying, “I don't need your love, I don't trust your food, I don't want to join in.” It's a rejection of the outside world. Truthfully, I never meant to isolate myself—I used to be the life and soul of the party . . . but when you've been badly hurt, it's safer to be alone.

Now, when Tom tries to look after me and I reject that, of course it's all about control, isn't it? When he asks me, yet again, to move in with him, instead of feeling loved I feel threatened. At the most basic level food is about nurture and care, and I don't always seem to be able to accept that or trust in it. When I do relax and allow Tom to look after me—whether that's running a hot bubble bath or bringing me breakfast in bed—it's a wonderful, peaceful feeling, like being a child, safe again.

Tom wants me to beat anorexia because he loves me, not because I'm weak. Why can't I accept that? Why is letting someone else in so hard—why does it feel like such a loss of control? And why, when they mess up my food, why can't I just eat it anyway?

In Tanzania I lived on pineapple. For an entire week. When we got back, my mouth and tongue were so ulcerated I could barely speak.

In Tanzania, Kenya, and other countries we've been to in Africa, most dishes are prepared in oil, butter, or ghee. That's just the way they cook; it's a cultural thing, and it can be hard to get them to do it any other way. We've been treated to top chefs and private dining, butlers in villas and romantic barbecues on the beach,
star-lit meals on dhows and candle-lit dinners on our veranda. Vegetables (my food of choice) are never a problem in Africa; they have delicious carrots, broccoli, and beans in abundance. But somewhere between the kitchen and the dinner table, it all goes horribly wrong. I have lost count of the number of evenings when, after requesting a plate of steamed vegetables—sometimes even writing down the request with clear, polite instructions:
Please just steam, please do not fry or add butter
—the vegetables have arrived at the table swimming in oil.

Carrots in butter? Broccoli glistening with oil? I can't do it.

I know what you're thinking: what a waste. What a miserable, controlling woman; what an unadventurous way to travel. You're right, and my boyfriend would probably agree with you. When he tried fruit-bat curry in the Seychelles (and I ate a plain green salad) I remember feeling sad that I couldn't join in. Obviously, one of the best things about foreign travel is foreign cuisine. But there is nothing more frightening to an anorexic than unknown food.

* * *

Driving through the Italian Alps a few weeks ago, on our way to a ski trip, we were remembering some of last year's adventures. We reminisced about the baboons in Kenya (the hotel was overrun with them and they stole my bananas) and how we drove all over Barbados looking for low-fat yogurt. We'd finally found some imported Müllers in a supermarket in Bridgetown and bought the whole stock! I ate them even though I suspected they might not be low-fat (they tasted suspiciously full-fat); that's how desperate I was.

Tom was remembering the problems we had in Zanzibar over bread rolls. We'd just arrived on the Spice Islands on a tiny six
seater propeller plane from Dar es Salaam, and we were cooling off in the plunge pool and trying to order dinner. It was nearly 100 degrees that first night and there was nothing I could eat on the room service menu. Tom was desperate to find something so he went to talk to the chef, to see if they could whip up some basic hummus or tzatziki (natural yogurt with cucumber) and maybe some bread rolls. These foods are on my “safe” list (although I hate the uncertainty of foreign versions: how exactly have they prepared them?).

Poor Tom, dripping with sweat and travel-weary, standing in that kitchen, trying to explain to the Tanzanian cooks how to make bread. They're not big on brown bread in Zanzibar, apparently, so the whole concept was alien to them. We thought:
water, flour, mold it into lumps
—is that even right? Who knows how you make bread?—and sort of knead it around and then bake it in the oven. He finally staggered back to the villa with a silver tray of tiny, burned, button-lumps of flour, and we both dissolved into hysterics. It was beyond a joke (and I was really hungry!) but he said they looked like “pregnant Maltesers” and it released all the tension.

I won't go into the episode when we tried to make yogurt in a hotel kitchen in Kenya. I don't actually know how you make yogurt (or bread, clearly). It's all to do with yeast and fermentation and leaving things to set, or rise, or something. Anyway, Tom and I didn't have a clue about the quantities or technique involved, and the results were disastrous: three large ramekins of soured, full-fat milk brought to our table every morning. Not yogurt. It was warm, like it had just come out of a cow, and curdled. (God, how I longed for Marks & Spencer.)

I'm starting to realize that I missed out on learning to cook. When other people were experimenting with recipes and holding elaborate dinner parties at university, I was starving myself.
Food has never been that kind of adventure for me, and I've never bought a cookbook, unless
The Food Doctor Diet
counts. Looking at my bookshelves now, I see I've been given a couple of cookbooks over the years—
Simple Vegetarian Cooking, Healthy Indian Food
—but I've never opened them. Many anorexics spend hours in the kitchen preparing elaborate meals for others, but I don't want to be around food. I flick straight past the food sections in the Sunday magazines (looking at those complicated food photographs repulses me).

I'm just not interested in cooking. I'm more comfortable with pure, cold food than hot meals. I prefer muesli with fresh organic milk, or a can of baked beans from the fridge. I had a new kitchen installed in my flat three years ago when I moved in. The previous tenants had defaulted on their mortgage, which is why I was able to afford a flat in Islington, and as part of their revenge shenanigans they ripped out the fitted kitchen and ran off with it. So I had this lovely silver and black chrome kitchen installed, but I've never even taken the instruction manual out of the oven.

* * *

One of the responses to my column that hurt me most (early on, before I toughened up) was, “If you can't feed yourself, how are you ever going to feed a baby?” In other words, sort out your own attitude to food and eating before you try to bring up a child. Is this right? And if I'm a bad cook, does that stop me from being a good mother? If I have anorexia, does that mean I can't look after my baby?

Who knows what makes good parents; who knows when anyone is ever “ready” for a child? Tom and I have talked about this a lot recently: he is about to turn forty. For him, the desire to become a father has been quite sudden. It may be that women are
biologically programmed to get broody: we have responsibility from early on for conception and contraception, so we tend to think about it and discuss it more than men. Even if you're not feeling particularly broody, as a woman it's hard to escape the dire warnings about plummeting fertility. But perhaps this business of being “ready” is just a red herring: I've watched my brothers and sisters, friends and colleagues, younger and older, many of whom aren't exactly parent material, and they get through it, they have their babies and they love them; it all works out in the end.

I don't think any couple can ever be 100 percent ready. Of course Tom and I aren't totally prepared for parenthood; that's the whole point, it's a journey into the unknown. But I don't think this is just me being broody—or Tom playing along to make me happy. I can see it in his eyes and I believe him when he tells me how much he wants us to have a child. And we agree that we're as ready as we're ever going to be.

(I know I'm jumping ahead of myself here. I'm not even pregnant, this is the whole point, and I'm not going to get pregnant unless I can gain enough weight.)

* * *

But then . . . what about all this travel? Is having a baby really compatible with this peripatetic lifestyle, footloose and fancy-free, a different hotel every weekend, a new country every couple of weeks? My eating disorder isn't the only thing under threat here: I think we need to accept that having a baby will force us to slow down. Babies need stability and routine—hell,
I
need stability and routine—and it might not be possible to go on passport-stamp collecting at such a rate.

In the past, our attempts to slow down have had limited success. We come back from a big trip—say, two weeks in South Africa last
Christmas, just before I ate that memorable Kit Kat—and we say we'll take a break from traveling, spend more time at home, enjoy London and catch up with friends. It never lasts. I remember after Cape Town we didn't book any trips or hotels for a few weeks, resolutely staying home. Then I caught Tom lingering over the travel section in
The Sunday Telegraph
, we both started tearing out new hotel features, and before long we were packing to go skiing in a remote corner of the Bernese Oberland. Itchy feet . . .

A few days ago I heard a neuroscientist and psychologist on Radio 4 discussing a possible link between autism and anorexia. At first, this seemed tenuous, but as I listened I became intrigued. Could there be something in this new research, something to do with the inability to relate (characteristic of the autism spectrum) and the dissociative state of anorexia, the denial of hunger, the detachment from the body? The research is still at an early stage, but it doesn't seem so far-fetched: for some reason I feel utterly detached from my body, and I respond to hunger differently from other people. As I've tried to show, this is more than just a diet gone wrong: I watch others eating and I have a strong sense that my brain is wired differently.

And then it made me think about travel, and why Tom and I are always moving. What is the travel really about? Of course there's the excitement of seeing new places and learning about the world; it's a great privilege and an adventure. It inspires us both, and it opens one's eyes to different people, languages, and cultures. But it's also a great way to avoid facing up to problems within oneself.

Perpetual motion seems to calm me—I can't sit still for long; jogging and cycling and swimming help me cope with the clamor in my head. At night, I rub my feet gently against each other, rub, rub, rub, hour after hour, to soothe myself; I curl my hands up tight under my chin to make me feel safe in bed (Tom calls it tucking) and shift them about throughout the night, trying to get secure.
My mother has a photograph of me, taken a few hours after my birth at the Hammersmith and West London Hospital: my hand is curled into a tiny fist and tucked under my chin—apparently I've always done that. As a child I used to rock myself to sleep (another feature of autism), and even now I find rhythmical rocking quite reassuring.

I wonder if perhaps this need for speed, this perpetual wanderlust, is a mild addiction. Or is something worrying me so much that I can't stay still?

Then again, I also enjoy coming home: after weeks on the road, long-haul flights and unfamiliar settings, staying alert, living out of a bag, being at the mercy of airline crews or hotel staff—finally the familiarity of one's own space. I enjoy unlocking the front door (and feeling the relief of not having been burgled), hauling my suitcase upstairs, sorting through the mail, chucking out the pizza flyers and the
Hackney Gazette
, loading the laundry into the washing machine, taking a shower, and lying down, clean and exhausted. My own bed. Home at last. The homecoming is all part of traveling.

So when that obstetrician advises me to slow down, stay home, rest up, I know it's not going to happen. Tom and I are travelers. Our baby will have to come along too.

Chapter 8

Miracle Cures

D
ear Emma, I have been following your columns with interest. I am a clinical hypnotherapist working with clients on “mind over matter” challenges. I wonder if you might be interested in a free session of hypnotherapy to support you? I think this could provide a safe environment for you to experience some powerful transitions
. . .